The end of ideology : on the exhaustion of political ideas in the fifties ([New ed.])

"The End of Ideology" has been a landmark in American social thought, regarded as a classic since its first publication in 1962.

Daniel Bell postulated that the older humanistic ideologies derived from the 19th and early 20th centuries were exhausted, and that new parochial ideologies would arise.

In a new introduction to the year 2000 edition, he argues that with the end of communism, we are seeing a resumption of history, a lifting of the heavy ideological blanket and the return of traditional ethnic and religious conflicts in the many regions of the former socialist states and elsewhere.